[bityard]

I have always understood self-hosting to mean being in charge of your applications and data instead of delegating it to a company. An example might be, setting up Nextcloud instead of Dropbox. Or Taiga instead of Trello.

WHERE and HOW it is hosted, is less important to me. Because if you self-host your own tools, you can freely pick them up and move them to any hosting provider, a cloud provider, or a Raspberry Pi in your basement. Self-hosting FREES you from infra/vendor lock-in.

[al_borland]

But isn’t using a 3rd party web host giving up some of that control. Hopefully a reputable hosting company won’t shutdown at a moments notice, but could. Or if they go down, you’re stuck sitting there waiting for them to come back online with no access to your services.

Hosting from home has its own challenges, so I get why people would go to a hosting provider, but I do think some control is given up in the process.

[bityard]

It depends on what you want to control. As I stated, I want full control over my apps and data. I am more than happy to rent power, compute, storage and bandwidth from someone else. I ran the math and found that running my own server 24/7 at home would increase my electricity bill by more than what I currently pay for my VPSes.

I self-host my stuff on third-party VPSes and cloud providers. Partly because my residential internet is not suitable for self-hosting and partly because I trust the infra in a profit-motivated datacenter to have WAY more 9s of uptime than anything I could cobble together in my basement. This stuff helps run my life, it's not my hobby, nor something I want to spend more than the necessary amount of time managing.

If I wake up tomorrow and my providers have gone dark without any warning, I am back in action in just a few simple steps:

1. Purchase a new VPS or two

2. Run ansible playbooks

3. Restore data from backups

[immibis]

You retain most of the control. You have actual laws protecting you from them snooping on your database. If it goes down, then you have a backup, right? so redeploy the backup onto any other provider or at home.

[al_borland]

Are those recent laws? It wasn’t a database, but many years ago I had a web host tell me to remove certain files from their servers or they would terminate my account. The stuff wasn’t publicly accessible, I just had it available for myself via FTP so I could get at them from a couple locations. So there was some snooping going on.

[user01010]

What of the event that your SSDs, HDDs, Discs, home devices, etc... stop working? Fire up Torrents or go back to Usenet? Just asking, but you still have online backups and they can't check your database right.